Harlan Coben
Bestselling thriller novelist, author of 38 books
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Harlan Coben is a bestselling thriller novelist with 38 books, including Tell No One, The Stranger and I Will Find You. The thing most worth learning from him is that he starts from a what if, knows his ending, and shows no one a draft, so the urge to tell the story goes onto the page.
The one rule you cannot break is you don't show anybody your shitty first draft.
How to Write a Novel (For Beginners) — Harlan Coben Interview
Harlan Coben: the story and the lessons
1Harlan Coben's life and the themes that found him
Coben lost many people young, and it shaped what he writes. He lost many people in his 20s and early 30s and gave about seven eulogies by age 32. He was too destroyed to give his father's. He keeps writing about missing people.
Writing his memoir and writing guide Plot Twist showed him he can't help writing what he writes. He says a novel without a personal core is only a way to pass the time.
Missing people carry hope, which matters to him more than justice. A missing person can still be found and a family redeemed. Murder only offers justice, and he is not interested in justice, retribution or punishment.
In I Will Find You, a man jailed for his son's murder sees a photo of an 8-year-old who might be that son. Under the prison escape and the mystery, it is a story of hope.
Coben writes ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, not heroes. Following Hitchcock, he likes the ordinary man in odd circumstances, often in first person. The pattern is a happy family where one small thing goes wrong and sets everything off.
Myron Bolitar, his sidekick Win and Wild all have special skills, but they stay human. He says heroes bore him.
He keeps his life orderly so his work can be wild. Coben agrees with Flaubert: be orderly in life so you can be violent and original in work. He calls himself a happy suburban dad, married to a working pediatrician.
The day he hit the New York Times list, his fourth child was born. The other three were 7, 4 and 2. His first published novel was the fourth one he wrote.
2How Coben finds a what if worth a year of work
Coben keeps a file of every what if and waits for one to stick. He writes down every idea he can, pages of what ifs. Most pass, but now and then one snags on a hook in his brain and will not let go.
Promise Me came from teenagers talking about drinking and driving. In real life nothing happened, but he asked what if one of them had actually called. He compares a novel to a marriage, since you live with it for a year or more.
He asks what if about every stranger and scene he sees. Walking down the street, he tries to work out each person's story. Fiction begins where life stops, with the question of what could have happened next.
The boy in The Boy from the Woods came from seeing a young boy on a hiking trail and asking what if he came out of the woods alone.
A good idea is one he cannot put aside. His test is to try to set the idea aside and see whether it stays in his heart and mind. A short story is a fun fling, but a novel needs an idea he will love for a long time.
He knows too many options paralyze, like a shopper facing 47 brands of peanut butter. He finds the two or three best routes and takes one.
3How Coben builds a plot: ending, form and character
Coben knows his ending before he starts, then wanders freely. He compares a novel to a drive to Los Angeles with the destination in the GPS. He can detour to Mount Rushmore and still get back on the main road. He has written 38 novels this way.
He cites E. L. Doctorow on driving in fog with only your headlights. Each detour must still matter to the final destination.
He leans on the thriller form so he never gets lost in his own genius. He compares the form to a sonata or a haiku. Within it, anything goes, and it forces him to keep telling a story.
Pace does not replace heart. Without characters, themes and good description, he says it is the most expensive car with no gasoline.
He cuts freely into a file called spare and never puts anything back. When he doubts a passage, he moves it into a spare file instead of deleting it. That makes cutting feel safe. Spare ends up around 50 pages of a 400 to 500 page book.
He has never restored anything in 37 or 38 novels. He says it is amazing what you can lose and still have what you want.
Coben treats character, plot and setting as one thing. Writing guides split them into chapters, and he says that is the mistake. Batman and Spider-Man become who they are through what happens to them.
The Boy from the Woods began on a hike in the Ramapo Mountains. The setting gave him a character and the character gave him a plot. Asked what he started with, he can't say.
He lets secondary characters take over and breaks the hero rule. In the Bolitar series, a woman meant for one opening scene came back and married the hero six books later. He loves it when a secondary character takes over, as in Missing You and Just One Look.
TV adapters push back and insist the hero must do the heroic act. His answer is that when you know the rules, you break them.
4How Coben keeps readers turning pages
He opens in the middle with a line that promises a real story. I Will Find You opens with a man serving the fifth year of a life sentence for murdering his own child, and adds that he didn't do it. Coben avoids the character who walks in and notices the flowers.
Readers now compete with Netflix and phone scrolling. Vonnegut said to start as close to the end as you can, and Coben starts with a man in the back pew watching the woman he loves marry someone else.
He builds suspense by answering questions that open bigger ones. Withholding information frustrates readers. In The Boy from the Woods, Wild confronts his father with the DNA result in chapter one, and the answer changes everything.
His chapters are short and end on a question by instinct. Other writers would stall for 50 pages. He calls making each answer lead to a deeper question a real challenge.
Every twist must carry emotion and change the other cards. A twist that only surprises is a cheap trick, like a cliffhanger for its own sake. He asks whether each one has emotional resonance before using it.
He is known as a master of the plot twist and still tests each one this way.
He makes the dull parts gripping instead of rushing through them. He asks of every paragraph, sentence and word whether it is compelling, and changes it if not. A neighbor's lawn looks like the PGA event, not just green.
The fix is better prose or a sharper detail, not simply cutting. In a fight scene he uses short sentences, sometimes with no subject, so the style doesn't distract.
Coben hunts for the flushed toilet moment, one vivid detail. Warren Murphy said the scariest sound is hearing a toilet flush upstairs when you are alone in a cabin. Coben looks for one detail like that instead of pages of description.
Route 23 in Wayne, New Jersey, becomes a tattoo parlor sign: Tattoos while you wait. A setting shows character too, like his brother's apartment with a freezer holding only vodka.
He uses no single suspense tool for every scene. Hitchcock's bomb under the table makes a dull conversation tense, but Coben also lets bombs explode from nowhere. Changing the tool keeps a story alive.
In the I Will Find You prison escape, the hero's enemy appears behind him at the elevator. The premiere audience gasped.
5Coben's rules for dialogue
Coben makes dialogue authentic but not realistic. Taped coffee-shop talk would put you to sleep in four minutes. He keeps lines short, lets characters go back and forth, and uses humor to make them likable.
His test is whether it is a conversation he would want to overhear in a pub. If not, he ups it.
Every exchange needs a purpose, though it can be quiet. The best dialogue has a sense of urgency, but it need not be a gunshot. It can be one person admitting they lost their parents young.
He says how a person talks tells you more than a description. The stoic boy from the woods speaks little, while Myron Bolitar, like his creator, never stops cracking wise.
He uses quiet scenes so the loud moments land. In a placid pond a small rock makes a ripple. In a churning ocean a boulder goes unnoticed. He finds nonstop adrenaline boring.
His father's death taught him that grief is the price of a great father. In a book he can run chapters of people talking, which a screen rarely allows.
6How Coben keeps writing: secrecy, fear and routine
He shows no one his first draft. Coben says you can break every writing rule except this one. Knowing nobody will see it lets him write hard and fast, then fix it afterward.
He cites Anne Lamott's chapter on the shitty first draft. He has a friend or relative whose job is to say it's wonderful so he doesn't get depressed.
He refuses to talk about the book he is writing. Telling people your plot lets the air out of the balloon, because you get some of the satisfaction for free. He has never joined a writers' group.
He is dying to tell people what his current book is about, and the only way to earn that is to write it. Talking plot points through with a trusted peer is a different thing, and he allows it.
Coben stays a little afraid and distrusts his own confidence. He says only bad writers think they're good. His muse is not an angel but an annoying mother telling him he really should be writing.
He lets fear fuel the work. His answer to the inner voice that says he sucks is: watch how bad I can suck. After 38 books the voice is still there.
On dull days he focuses on the finished book and the reader. He says the process is rarely magical. He borrows Oscar Madison's line: I don't like writing, I like having written.
When it goes well, time vanishes and he has sat six hours at the desk. He says a writer without a reader is a man clapping with one hand.
He makes writing a priority or admits it is a hobby. Coben says that if life leaves no room for writing, that is fine, but you are not yet a writer. Every successful writer he knows was obsessed.
Mary Higgins Clark, widowed at 37 with five kids, wrote from 5 to 7 a.m. at the kitchen table before waking them. Her first book was Where Are the Children.
He rides a writing spot until it dies, then finds another. Coben calls himself a serial routinist. He leaves the house to write because home offers too many excuses.
He took Ubers for three weeks while finishing The Stranger, and wrote at a supermarket deli counter for about four months. He came home smelling like olive loaf. John Grisham does the opposite with a strict cottage routine.
7How Coben thinks about adapting his books
He changes what only works on the page and keeps the rest. Novels are interior, so the screen must find other ways to tell the story. Coben asks why a writer would want the same experience twice.
In The Stranger, a male computer nerd looked wrong on screen. The role became a younger woman, played by Hannah John-Kamen, and her entrance set the mood at once.
He holds that a bad adaptation cannot hurt the book. He quotes James M. Cain, asked if he hated what Hollywood did to his books. Cain said they had done nothing, the books are right there on the shelf.
Coben loves Portnoy's Complaint and The Bonfire of the Vanities even though both films are unwatchable.
How to Write a Novel (For Beginners) — Harlan Coben Interview
Harlan Coben explains how he builds suspenseful, heartfelt novels: he starts from a 'what if', knows his ending, and treats plot, character and setting as one thing. His most useful habit is that he never shows or even describes a draft in progress, so the urge to tell the story gets spent on the page.
Coben lost many people young, and it shaped what he writes. He lost many people in his 20s and early 30s and gave about seven eulogies by age 32. He was too destroyed to give his father's. He keeps writing about missing people.
Writing his memoir and writing guide Plot Twist showed him he can't help writing what he writes. He says a novel without a personal core is only a way to pass the time.
Missing people carry hope, which matters to him more than justice. A missing person can still be found and a family redeemed. Murder only offers justice, and he is not interested in justice, retribution or punishment.
In I Will Find You, a man jailed for his son's murder sees a photo of an 8-year-old who might be that son. Under the prison escape and the mystery, it is a story of hope.
Coben writes ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, not heroes. Following Hitchcock, he likes the ordinary man in odd circumstances, often in first person. The pattern is a happy family where one small thing goes wrong and sets everything off.
Myron Bolitar, his sidekick Win and Wild all have special skills, but they stay human. He says heroes bore him.
He keeps his life orderly so his work can be wild. Coben agrees with Flaubert: be orderly in life so you can be violent and original in work. He calls himself a happy suburban dad, married to a working pediatrician.
The day he hit the New York Times list, his fourth child was born. The other three were 7, 4 and 2. His first published novel was the fourth one he wrote.
Coben keeps a file of every what if and waits for one to stick. He writes down every idea he can, pages of what ifs. Most pass, but now and then one snags on a hook in his brain and will not let go.
Promise Me came from teenagers talking about drinking and driving. In real life nothing happened, but he asked what if one of them had actually called. He compares a novel to a marriage, since you live with it for a year or more.
He asks what if about every stranger and scene he sees. Walking down the street, he tries to work out each person's story. Fiction begins where life stops, with the question of what could have happened next.
The boy in The Boy from the Woods came from seeing a young boy on a hiking trail and asking what if he came out of the woods alone.
A good idea is one he cannot put aside. His test is to try to set the idea aside and see whether it stays in his heart and mind. A short story is a fun fling, but a novel needs an idea he will love for a long time.
He knows too many options paralyze, like a shopper facing 47 brands of peanut butter. He finds the two or three best routes and takes one.
Coben knows his ending before he starts, then wanders freely. He compares a novel to a drive to Los Angeles with the destination in the GPS. He can detour to Mount Rushmore and still get back on the main road. He has written 38 novels this way.
He cites E. L. Doctorow on driving in fog with only your headlights. Each detour must still matter to the final destination.
He leans on the thriller form so he never gets lost in his own genius. He compares the form to a sonata or a haiku. Within it, anything goes, and it forces him to keep telling a story.
Pace does not replace heart. Without characters, themes and good description, he says it is the most expensive car with no gasoline.
He cuts freely into a file called spare and never puts anything back. When he doubts a passage, he moves it into a spare file instead of deleting it. That makes cutting feel safe. Spare ends up around 50 pages of a 400 to 500 page book.
He has never restored anything in 37 or 38 novels. He says it is amazing what you can lose and still have what you want.
Coben treats character, plot and setting as one thing. Writing guides split them into chapters, and he says that is the mistake. Batman and Spider-Man become who they are through what happens to them.
The Boy from the Woods began on a hike in the Ramapo Mountains. The setting gave him a character and the character gave him a plot. Asked what he started with, he can't say.
He lets secondary characters take over and breaks the hero rule. In the Bolitar series, a woman meant for one opening scene came back and married the hero six books later. He loves it when a secondary character takes over, as in Missing You and Just One Look.
TV adapters push back and insist the hero must do the heroic act. His answer is that when you know the rules, you break them.
He opens in the middle with a line that promises a real story. I Will Find You opens with a man serving the fifth year of a life sentence for murdering his own child, and adds that he didn't do it. Coben avoids the character who walks in and notices the flowers.
Readers now compete with Netflix and phone scrolling. Vonnegut said to start as close to the end as you can, and Coben starts with a man in the back pew watching the woman he loves marry someone else.
He builds suspense by answering questions that open bigger ones. Withholding information frustrates readers. In The Boy from the Woods, Wild confronts his father with the DNA result in chapter one, and the answer changes everything.
His chapters are short and end on a question by instinct. Other writers would stall for 50 pages. He calls making each answer lead to a deeper question a real challenge.
Every twist must carry emotion and change the other cards. A twist that only surprises is a cheap trick, like a cliffhanger for its own sake. He asks whether each one has emotional resonance before using it.
He is known as a master of the plot twist and still tests each one this way.
He makes the dull parts gripping instead of rushing through them. He asks of every paragraph, sentence and word whether it is compelling, and changes it if not. A neighbor's lawn looks like the PGA event, not just green.
The fix is better prose or a sharper detail, not simply cutting. In a fight scene he uses short sentences, sometimes with no subject, so the style doesn't distract.
Coben hunts for the flushed toilet moment, one vivid detail. Warren Murphy said the scariest sound is hearing a toilet flush upstairs when you are alone in a cabin. Coben looks for one detail like that instead of pages of description.
Route 23 in Wayne, New Jersey, becomes a tattoo parlor sign: Tattoos while you wait. A setting shows character too, like his brother's apartment with a freezer holding only vodka.
He uses no single suspense tool for every scene. Hitchcock's bomb under the table makes a dull conversation tense, but Coben also lets bombs explode from nowhere. Changing the tool keeps a story alive.
In the I Will Find You prison escape, the hero's enemy appears behind him at the elevator. The premiere audience gasped.
Coben makes dialogue authentic but not realistic. Taped coffee-shop talk would put you to sleep in four minutes. He keeps lines short, lets characters go back and forth, and uses humor to make them likable.
His test is whether it is a conversation he would want to overhear in a pub. If not, he ups it.
Every exchange needs a purpose, though it can be quiet. The best dialogue has a sense of urgency, but it need not be a gunshot. It can be one person admitting they lost their parents young.
He says how a person talks tells you more than a description. The stoic boy from the woods speaks little, while Myron Bolitar, like his creator, never stops cracking wise.
He uses quiet scenes so the loud moments land. In a placid pond a small rock makes a ripple. In a churning ocean a boulder goes unnoticed. He finds nonstop adrenaline boring.
His father's death taught him that grief is the price of a great father. In a book he can run chapters of people talking, which a screen rarely allows.
He shows no one his first draft. Coben says you can break every writing rule except this one. Knowing nobody will see it lets him write hard and fast, then fix it afterward.
He cites Anne Lamott's chapter on the shitty first draft. He has a friend or relative whose job is to say it's wonderful so he doesn't get depressed.
He refuses to talk about the book he is writing. Telling people your plot lets the air out of the balloon, because you get some of the satisfaction for free. He has never joined a writers' group.
He is dying to tell people what his current book is about, and the only way to earn that is to write it. Talking plot points through with a trusted peer is a different thing, and he allows it.
Coben stays a little afraid and distrusts his own confidence. He says only bad writers think they're good. His muse is not an angel but an annoying mother telling him he really should be writing.
He lets fear fuel the work. His answer to the inner voice that says he sucks is: watch how bad I can suck. After 38 books the voice is still there.
On dull days he focuses on the finished book and the reader. He says the process is rarely magical. He borrows Oscar Madison's line: I don't like writing, I like having written.
When it goes well, time vanishes and he has sat six hours at the desk. He says a writer without a reader is a man clapping with one hand.
He makes writing a priority or admits it is a hobby. Coben says that if life leaves no room for writing, that is fine, but you are not yet a writer. Every successful writer he knows was obsessed.
Mary Higgins Clark, widowed at 37 with five kids, wrote from 5 to 7 a.m. at the kitchen table before waking them. Her first book was Where Are the Children.
He rides a writing spot until it dies, then finds another. Coben calls himself a serial routinist. He leaves the house to write because home offers too many excuses.
He took Ubers for three weeks while finishing The Stranger, and wrote at a supermarket deli counter for about four months. He came home smelling like olive loaf. John Grisham does the opposite with a strict cottage routine.
He changes what only works on the page and keeps the rest. Novels are interior, so the screen must find other ways to tell the story. Coben asks why a writer would want the same experience twice.
In The Stranger, a male computer nerd looked wrong on screen. The role became a younger woman, played by Hannah John-Kamen, and her entrance set the mood at once.
He holds that a bad adaptation cannot hurt the book. He quotes James M. Cain, asked if he hated what Hollywood did to his books. Cain said they had done nothing, the books are right there on the shelf.
Coben loves Portnoy's Complaint and The Bonfire of the Vanities even though both films are unwatchable.